Introduction

• Since Stephen Curry has been in the NBA, 3-point shooting has increased substantially while midrange shots have steadily decreased
• We decided to look at how Stephen Curry compares to other 3 point shooters
• We also looked at in the past 23 years how 3 point shooting has changed

Stephen Curry compared to All Time Top 20 NBA 3 Point Shooters

• We first decided to look at the top 20 NBA 3 point shooters all time and compare them to Stephen Curry

• This scatter graph shows the each of the top 20 three point shooters by the amount of three pointers made and the number of games played

Stephen Curry Shooting Chart Compaired to Ray Allen

• We then decided to take the analysis a step farther by comparing Stephen Curry to the second best three point shooter Ray Allen

• We used the nbastatR package

• The graphs for both Ray Allen and Stephen Curry are of their shooting positions when taking 3 point attempts

For Stephen Curry:

For Ray Allen:

NBA 3 Point Shooting

• While thinking about how the NBA overall 3 point shooting has changed we decided to visualize this

• We pulled our data from basketballrefrence.com

• We used the regular season averages for each team to look at how the 3 point shooting rate has changed since 1999 to 2022

Predicting Future 3 Point Attempt Percentage

• We then decided to predict what would the future 3 point attempt percentage based on the increase in years

• We did this by using linear regression

• We predicted for 10 years in the future (2032) and for 20 years in the future (2042)

  colnames(results_final)[9] <- "ThreeAtmp"
  results_final <- results_final %>%
    mutate(ThreeAtemptPec = ThreeAtmp/FGA)
  
  lm_three_atempts <- lm(ThreeAtemptPec ~ season,
  data = results_final)
  
  summary(lm_three_atempts)

  ## 
  ## Call:
  ## lm(formula = ThreeAtemptPec ~ season, data = results_final)
  ## 
  ## Residuals:
  ##       Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max 
  ## -0.119593 -0.031478 -0.000227  0.029430  0.182797 
  ## 
  ## Coefficients:
  ##               Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
  ## (Intercept) -2.004e+01  5.153e-01  -38.90   <2e-16 ***
  ## season       1.009e-02  2.563e-04   39.38   <2e-16 ***
  ## ---
  ## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
  ## 
  ## Residual standard error: 0.04805 on 736 degrees of freedom
  ## Multiple R-squared:  0.6782, Adjusted R-squared:  0.6778 
  ## F-statistic:  1551 on 1 and 736 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

#For 2032
Prediction_1 <- data.frame("season" = 2032)
predict(lm_three_atempts, newdata = Prediction_1)

##         1 
## 0.4678743

#For 2032
Prediction_2 <- data.frame("season" = 2042)
predict(lm_three_atempts, newdata = Prediction_2)

##         1 
## 0.5688134

Conclusion

• Stephen Curry had a major impact on basketball 3 point shooting and the way the game is played today
• We can also see from the descriptive statistics how different of a 3 point shooter he is compared to other pro basketball players